In fact, in today’s podcast, we will be learning how to use the word “等”, which means “wait”. I’ll also form sentences using words that you have learnt in previous podcasts before, so there will be opportunities for you to revise and practise! Ok, let’s start!

Have you ever been in a conversation where it gets a little too fast for you? Well, here’s a handy phrase for you in Hokkien that I often use it myself, “等等等, 你可以讲加一次无?”.

If you notice, I deliberately repeated the word “等” a few times, so that I can catch the attention of the speaker as well as to express that the pace is a tad too fast for me. As for the rest of the sentence, well…. we’ve learnt the words before. Can you figure out what it means? You can pause the audio here to gather your thoughts, while I 等一下.

Now, the phrase “等等等, 你可以讲加一次无?” means “Wait wait wait, can you say it one more time?”. Did you get it right? I hope so!

Another common scenario where Hokkien speakers use “等” is when we pick up a call on someone else’s behalf. In this case, we will say “请等一下，我叫伊(他/她)来听电话”. The only new word here is “伊”, which means “him” or “her”. Once again, are you able to figure out what the whole sentence means? Please give it a try and resume the audio only when you are ready!

The first part of the phrase means “Please wait a moment” and the second part means “I will call him or her to the phone”.

Our Philosophy for Learning Hokkien in Singapore

The pronunciation of Hokkien words varies from one region to another. For example, Penang Hokkien sounds different from Taiwanese Hokkien. At LearnDialect.sg, we want to make learning Hokkien fun, easy and practical for daily conversations in Singapore. As such, we think it is important to listen to how Singaporeans speak Hokkien. To do that, we have an ongoing process of collecting audio recordings from at least 100 Hokkien-speaking seniors in Singapore and thereafter based our audio pronunciation on the most commonly-heard version. Paragraph

In similar nature, rather than trying to figure out which Hokkien romanization system to use (e.g. Pe̍h-ōe-jī or Taiwan Romanization System), we encourage you to form your own phonics, so that you make an association with these Hokkien words in the quickest way possible. To illustrate, the formal romanization of the English word, “eat”, is “chia̍h” in Hokkien. However, in our “Have You Eaten” podcast transcript, you’ll find that we use “jiak”, which we think relates to us better. That said, you may use other romanization (e.g “chiah”, “jia”, etc), as long as it helps you to make sense of what you hear.

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